the synthetic PTBL hides the differences between various PTBL schemas and so
is great for making the data transfer much easier.

Why should I deal with that in first place???
I don't have any Atari disks and I have no intention of creating one.

As soon as you partition disk you create one, don't you?

Forcing it OTOH means it prevents me from creating my own partitions.

you can create your own partitions - just do it on the host side!
If you insist on playing with fdisk on linux-m68k then simply use the IDE disk
drives but I believe that most people in most cases simply don't need the
fdisk and will gladly skip it and mount the partitions directly.

Why are you trying so hard to talk away that people might find it useful
to partition their devices under Linux?

I don't say it's not useful (for somebody who likes playing with disk
partitioning software) - I just say that it's not needed at all for
majority of users. Being useful is very different from being required.
And if it's not required people will gladly skip it :-)

IDE devices are harder to setup, so I'd prefer to point people to the
simple option, which _requires_ that they can use a normal installer to
install Linux on these devices, which usually requires to partition them.

As long as that is not possible, it's simply not an usable option.

The installer sees the existing partitions and can use them, correct?
You don't have to repartition an existing disk partitions in order to be
able to install Linux. Or am I wrong?

If I wanted to point people to the simple option I'd tell them:

1) start ARAnyM, go to its setup, create a partition large enough for
the whole system, say 1 GB.

2) run debian installer and when it comes to partitioning simply use the
found partition and continue.

That's it. No need to teach them how to partition a drive, how much to
reserve for this or that... And once the existing partition gets full
you can simply add another one...

Besides all this talk - the IDE drives are mapped as whole drives and
you can partition them, can't you? And setting up IDE disk drive is
actually easier than setting up the SCSI partition because you don't
have to enter the partition ID - setting up the filename is all you
need. So I don't take your argument that setting IDE is worse than
setting the SCSI/partition.

Petr

P.S. I really need to get a working kernel with your nfblock
implementation to stop talking about how it should be working and simply
try out how it is working currently. But I belive I'll find out that it
works how I explain - otherwise it would be a bug in the implementation ;-)